Friday, April 03, 2015

Mind-Matter Dualism and Incarnational Trialism

Come to think of it, we can't blame Descartes for everything. After all, there's the rest of the world. It has always been a trainwreck.

Furthermore, Descartes is hardly the first to commit the error of dualism. Rather, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, neoplatonism, and even Buddhism fall into the same cosmic heresy of dividing the world into naughty and nice, and then escaping into the nice.

Yes, but isn't this the whole point of religion? How is this different from the whole satan thingy?

There is no doubt that some forms of Christianity have and continue to fall into dualism, even though the whole Christian message is rooted in a metaphysic that is supposed to render this impossible. Rather, there is one creator, and everything he creates is good. To the extent that something fails to be good, then it is not the result of an evil co-creator or co-equal force of darkness -- as, for example, Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism.

I would suggest that it is a permanent human temptation to divide the world in this manner. In modern times it is most effectively practiced by the left, which cannot function without demonization, vilification, and calumny.

For example, one of the (admittedly many) reasons MSNBC has tanked so badly is that demonization works fine when someone else is in charge. When the left is in charge, who's left to demonize? Pizza parlors, bakers, imaginary rapists, nonexistent racists, dissenting tea partiers, etc.

As Ace wrote, "the left is now patrolling the already-won battlefield to find survivors and shoot them -- while forever casting itself as the trespassed-upon victim." Or as Iowahawk tweeted, "Don't compare yourself to a Selma marcher when you're unleashing the dogs and firehoses." Another tweetist reminds us of how "the civil rights movement really got going when Rosa Parks went door to door trying to find someone who wouldn't give her a ride." The left desperately searches for demons to account for the evils it unleashes.

I think it's fair to say that people truly long for a simplistic, dualistic world, because then it's so easy to recognize and eliminate the problem. But if the problem runs straight through the human heart, then it's not so easy. Then it's even possible for a negro to be racist, or a person with a vagina to be incompetent, or a sodomist to be a bully, or an immigrant to be a drain on the rest of us, or a man of tenure to be a retard!

Yesterday I saw a clip of Bill Maher going on about how all religions are stupid. Easy for him to say, since his religion of Pure Light by definition has only intelligent and virtuous people like himself.

Along these lines, I recently read a book called At the Heart of the Gospel, which is a kind of popular summary of Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, which in turn is -- in JP's view -- a summary of Christianity itself.

For at the heart of the gospel is what? A union of God and man, of spirit and flesh, of time and eternity -- as opposed to a division of these things. Not only is this is a radical notion, but it must be counter-intuitive, otherwise why would God have to go to all that trouble of making it known to us? And one reason why it is so radical is that it goes against our tendency to reach for a facile dualism.

At the heart of the gospel are actually two principles: Incarnation and Trinity, the latter of which counters the dualistic temptation from a different angle.

West starts with a passage from the Catechism: "The flesh is the hinge of salvation," and "We believe in the Word made flesh in order to redeem the flesh."

But there have always been misbelievers who split "body and soul in order to 'free' love from... the 'unflattering' and 'unholy' realities of bodiliness." Again, that is the easy way out (and a mirror of the other easy alternative into a soulless hedonism): the former is "angelism," the latter "animalism" (Descartes and his descendants are angelists).

But just as Jesus is God and man, we are human and animal, not one or the other. The task is not to repress or deny the animal, but rather, to elevate it; or better, to infuse it with the same "divine descent" that came into the flesh more generally. That descent goes all the way down.

Thus, in the words of Cardinal Newman (quoted by West), the object "is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God and have been put asunder by man." We need to re-integrate our dis-integration (or rather, recognize that "it is accomplished").

The "descent of God is intended to draw us into a movement of ascent" (Ratzinger, ibid). I find it useful to visualize this as a continuous spiral of (⇅), whereby man may participate in this trinitarian movement. The movement, of course, goes all the way down and all the way up -- to hell and back, you might say. We know it goes all the way to hell, because we have read and heard countless spiritual autobiographies of people who were reached in hell's kitchen and managed to turn their lives around.

We will get back to our main subject on Monday, but this is very much related to it, because "by fleeing the material world in search of the spirit, we actually embrace the essential tenet of materialism" (West).

In other words, one can be a materialist both by embracing or rejecting matter, i.e., by taking one side of the Cartesian dualism. In this way, the rejection only gives more force to its opposite tendency, otherwise those atheist activists would be out of business.

In short, "The Christian response to both materialism and spiritualism is the Incarnation," such that "there is no reaching the 'higher' without pondering the 'lower'"; or, "we reach the 'higher' precisely because" it "has descended into the 'lower'" (West). This is both the logic of the logos and the logos of logic.

And we can't accomplice this climb this without a body, "which has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world" the otherwise hidden mystery of God.

46 Comments:

"The left desperately searches for demons to account for the evils it unleashes."

This is the key. Yes, dualism was hardly Descartes' idea, it's always been around, and though it brings problems with it, it does not, and cannot, account for the problems of modernity.

But that wasn't the novel or even critical factor that Descartes contributed to the modern muddle, his 'Method of Doubt' was. Not questioning (which is inherently positive, integrative), but 'Doubting' which even if natural, is negative in nature, but he didn't propose following up on those doubts that popped into mind during the day, he proposed pretending to have doubts, for no reason other than that there maybe... could be... somehow might possibly be a 'reason' to think there could be a problem that needs to be addressed.

So step #1 of your new plan of reasoning, is to begin reasoning without a valid reason to suspect a problem. Remember, he isn't saying that you should question deeply in order to better understand the truth of a matter, he's saying to arbitrarily assume there is a problem, and them go look for proof of that.

The disintegrating mudslide of thinking that follows from this is... all around us today.

A heart with no memoriesAs bright and spotless as the sunDoes it belong to anyoneWhose heart was it beforeAn open heaven without a cloudIs there such a thing anymoreIt came not from the proudWhose self-image is their diseaseNor did the lowly give it birthWhose humble thoughts have worthA great canyon without a breezeA still and silent mirthImmutable thing that movesHere the real and ideal agreesIn the world there's no greater easeThan once found to simply loseA heart with no memories.

'Purity of heart' is a mystery; Taoism seems utterly pre-occupied with the state (and for good reason!)

"For at the heart of the gospel is what? A union of God and man, of spirit and flesh, of time and eternity -- as opposed to a division of these things. Not only is this is a radical notion, but it must be counter-intuitive, otherwise why would God have to go to all that trouble of making it known to us? And one reason why it is so radical is that it goes against our tendency to reach for a facile dualism."

To add to this, the desire for liberty is also counter-intuitive to most people, or at least liberty for all.Even in the U.S..Because those on the left, the vast majority anyway only care about their own personal rights and liberties.They are more than okay with conservatives not having any.

The left has won the culture war. Now it is a matter of drilling down to the individual level. The left knows that one man with truth is a majority, so it's analogous to how King Herod has to murder all the male children because he doesn't know which one is the One. Better safe than sorry.

Yes; it seems more and more that, much as the Democratic party has moved so far left that it has left people behind, as it were, America as a whole is moving the same way. I don't feel the same connection with being American that I once did; rather, it's more like being a stranger in a strange land, and the only true home is Upper Tonga.

"The most important thing to understand about this phase of the culture war is that the left's goal is to break you as an individual, to take away your values and to replace them with their own. If it cannot do these things, it will try to destroy you and even use you as a cautionary tale to warn others" (Sultan K).

Though it is heartening that the owners of the pizza parlor have received so much support after all the threats. I hope they do okay in the long run; coming into such a windfall can often do more harm than good, too, no matter how well-intentioned the givers are.

Wouldn't be surprising; either they'll strongarm GoFundMe into refusing to allow "hate" funding, or else they'll send people to cry fraud ("Just in case!") every time a targeted hater tries to raise funds.

Though it occurred to me only this morning, the pizza place event may have been the next necessary step toward forcing all priests to perform gay marriages. Intensional or otherwise, the event was fabricated.

Speaking of the public education component, one wit was saying that Dana's GoFundMe account for the pizza parlor, was a put up job by the GOP - her evidence was "$840,000 raised in just a few days by only 30,000 donors?! Do the math! That's approx $29,000 each! Obviously the Koch Brothers!"

Gotta love it, as you cry. BTW, Dana also set them up with a financial guy to help them step through all the tax loops, etc, safely. They'll still need to be careful not to try and make the money bigger than they are, but at least they'll be of to a good start at the start.

The latest one is helping an elderly florist in WA who was taken down by the state for not fully fitting out a gay wedding, started informally last night and is already tallying up nicely.

Virtual flash mobs of the Right, building up, instead of tearing down.

And the Pro-regressive left doesn't like it one bit that we're impeding their regression. A new twist in battling power is coming... I'm not sure what it's going to look like, but I think it is going to be truly epic.

Even without doing the math, a quick glance at the GoFundMe page shows the donations being made; most of them in the vicinity of $20 to $30.

And yes, they're working hard to keep people from supporting the oppressed. I wonder if this is where net neutrality will really start to shine? Just wait 'til the FCC starts penalizing The Wrong Kind of Expression. Instead of the seven words we may not say, it'll be the seven thoughts we cannot think...

Speaking of the Just in Case Fraud Case, there was a caller to the Rush show years ago. A youngster, and the discussion was about raising the minimum wage. He asked her how much it should be. Her perspective was from good intentions and so forth and his from consequences. Eventually he said, why don't we give everyone a million dollars. Maybe it was 10 million. No at that point you think he's getting somewhere because she admits it wouldn't be right. So he asks he why, and she says, because they won't spend it right.She may be a kickass journalist now.

"So step #1 of your new plan of reasoning, is to begin reasoning without a valid reason to suspect a problem. Remember, he isn't saying that you should question deeply in order to better understand the truth of a matter, he's saying to arbitrarily assume there is a problem, and them go look for proof of that. "

This is generally how I work with decisions created by the federal bureaucracy.

Granted, I think this is the exception that proves the rule.

So, rather than creating a general philosophical analytic method, the Method of Doubt, he actually created a very specific practical tool that I use on a daily basis.

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Location: Floating in His Cloud-Hidden Bobservatory, Inside the Centers for Spiritual Disease Control and Pretension, Tonga

Who spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and embarks upin a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling? Who, haloed be his gnome, loiters on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway, looking for handouts from Petey? Who, with his doppelgägster and testy snideprick, Cousin Dupree, wields the pliers and blowtorch of fine insultainment for the ridicure of assouls? Who is the gentleman loaffeur who yoinks the sword from the stoned philosopher and shoves it in the breadbasket of metaphysical ignorance and tenure? Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of 〇 into the feeble stream of cyberspace? Who is the masked pandit who lobs the first water balloon out the motel window at the annual Raccoon convention? Who is your nonlocal partner in disorganized crimethink? Shut your mouth! But I'm talkin' about bʘb! Then we can dig it!